Wednesday, July 23, 2014

"The Catholic Spiritual Life" by Dr Eric Johnston

by Kathleen Pluth

Delighted to run across a wonderful blog by an old friend and classmate, Dr. Eric Johnston, a seminary professor living with his large family in Newark.

The Catholic Spiritual Life is a peaceful and informative blog, something like either liturgical spirituality, or spiritual theology--drawing theological truth from all those wonderful sources that we have available to us as Catholics. All of these sources of truth bear upon one another, and we can be caught up in their dynamism, and filled with the living Word of God.

A sample:

At last we return to our orderly reading of Matthew – and see how beautiful are the ordinary words of the Gospel.

“Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves.

For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”

Such words are like balm. They are really
worth reading and hearing just to bathe in them. Such a beautiful
reminder that none of our pious meditations can equal the healing power
of God’s word.

***

But let us come to him, and learn! These
words teach us even more when we read them in context. The Lectionary is
good enough to give us the verses that immediately proceed.

“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven
and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and
the learned you have revealed them to little ones. . . . No one knows
the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son
and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”

The two halves of this paragraph illumine one
another. Not by strength does man prevail. It’s not human wisdom that
discovers the love of the Father. It’s a gift, through Jesus Christ.

And this is the deeper meaning of “take my
yoke upon you.” The “rest” he gives us is precisely knowledge of the
Father. This is the cure to our labors and burdens.

We have to take his “yoke” upon us. But this
doesn’t mean hard work. To the contrary, it means being so assimilated
to him that we let him be our all – let Jesus be the source of our
strength, and learn from him to receive everything from the Father.
That’s the true meaning of meekness.

And meekness is a “yoke” – a challenge to our
self-sufficient ways, requiring a real change of behavior – but also
“easy,” because what we learn is precisely that we don’t have to be
self-sufficient.

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